I gave up on Quicken years ago (DW says I have "incredible" patience ).* As I said in another thread, "...my attitude towards their [Intuit's] entire product line is that you should open the lid on the toilet and throw them intuit."

I agree one must be careful with Quicken. I am using the 2002 Deluxe version and look at Investment Performance reports (not graph) reporting out to make sure all the inputs and outputs look right. Other than having to remember that re-invested dividends on mutual funds are investment returns and not starting balances, I then calculate return on my own calculator.

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I did mine by first adding back the $25,000 that I withdrew from my account for living expenses. I then subtracted from this number the year end 2004 values as per statements, and divided by the yearend 2004 value.

Figured this way, my return for 2005 to today is 13.7%. Which is slightly more than my long term return in the only untouched account I have had for >30 years, my Keo.

I carried a lot of cash all year and some puts which expired worthless. But that drag was made up by very strong results in energy and Japan, and fairly strong results in gold.

While I am hoping for a positive year in 2006, when we do this next year I will feel ok if I can report any result >= 0.

There is literally no class toward which I have a confidently bullish disposition.

Ha

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"As a general rule, the more dangerous or inappropriate a conversation, the more interesting it is."-Scott Adams

Suppose I have on 12/31/2004 $30,000* *I invest an additional $5000 on Jan 4, 2005 and now I have $40,000.* * Since the $5K was there almost the whole year, it's like a $35K at the start, $40K at the end, so for all practial purposes the YTD is 14.3%

But suppose I invest the $5K on 12/22/2005.* In essence, the $5K wasn't in the account long enough to make a difference.* It's like I have $30K invested the whole year that increased in value by $5K to $35K, then I added $5K.* So my return is very close to 16.7% (35K/30K).*

In essence, one needs to carefully consider the amount of time each bit of money was invested.* And that's what MSMoney, PFROI, and Quicken are supposed to be good at.

I computed the gain on only that money I had at the start of the year based on share values and interest rates. I didn't bother to try to track this years contributions.

I use Excel to keep track of my portfolio. One sheet lists each fund or stock with gain/loss and annualized return. This shows how well each holding is performing. Another sheet shows the overall gain or loss vs the Wilshire 5000 benchmark and the Coffee House benchmark for each year.

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May we live in peace and harmony and be free from all human sufferings.

I gave up on quicken and stopped trying to use Money after a brief time tinkering. In my experience, none of the products download the information correctly, a number of financial institutions (ameritrade is a good one) download the wrong information, and even if you can manage to get the info correct the results still didnt match up.

I found that both Intuit and the financial institutions involved could care less about fixing the problems. I chased ameritrade for three years on their download problems and finally took my money elsewhere.

So now I do it simply: One bank (Digital Credit Union) except for cash slush at emigrant direct, and all my investing at vanguard. Whatever they say I have is what i've got. Delta from one year to the next is my change in investment valuations.

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Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful. Just another form of "buy low, sell high" for those who have trouble with things. This rule is not universal. Do not buy a 1973 Pinto because everyone else is afraid of it.

I have had some problems with Quicken, but they always turned out to be errors I made by inadvertantly including or excluding accounts or categories in reports. I never download transactions from financial institutions because to do so defeats the purpose of running a home accounting system: reconciliation of my view of what happened to their view of what happened.

I never download transactions from financial institutions because to do so defeats the purpose of running a home accounting system: reconciliation of my view of what happened to their view of what happened.*

Like TH, I don't download transactions because it just freakin' doesn't work right!

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*The book written on E-R.org, "The Military Guide to Financial Independence and Retirement", on sale now! For more info see "About Me" in my profile.
I don't spend much time here anymore, so please send me a PM. Thanks.

I never download transactions from financial institutions because to do so defeats the purpose of running a home accounting system: reconciliation of my view of what happened to their view of what happened.*

I am happy to report that I download our TDWaterhouse bank account transactions without problems into MSMoney.
We do not have enough brokerage/investment account transactions to make it worthwhile to download those, but I really respect and like NYCGuy's rationalization of why not to do that.

reconciliation of my view of what happened to their view of what happened.

I used to worry about this a lot. After ten years of scrutinizing my bank and investment statements I found a lot of little screw ups. It always turned out to be my mistake. So I just look for big stuff now (like 14,000 charges to my mastercard from nigeria).

Granted this is only with the outfits that havent really screwed anything up, like DCU and vanguard. Ameritrade, american express and a few others have seriously and persistently made mistakes. My favorite of all time? I had an investment account with american express and at one point transferred all of my fund holdings (all Janus...hey...it was the late 90's) directly to the fund holder. In one of those "you have to be kidding" moments, they transferred all of american expresses entire holdings in all Janus funds into my Janus account.

I'm not making this up. They had to ask me for written permission to take it back. How tempting to say "NO!".

For a day or so I was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. You can bet I took that end of month statement showing "my holdings" to the bar to pass around to my buddies and ask them if they had any ideas on changes to my strategy.

So far, worst thing DCU has done to me is persistently open my CD's with dividend reinvestment rather than paying it out like I note on the forms. No errors on my vanguard acct.

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Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful. Just another form of "buy low, sell high" for those who have trouble with things. This rule is not universal. Do not buy a 1973 Pinto because everyone else is afraid of it.

I can understand the importance of YTD figures, but total portfolio percentage increase/decreases are the most meaningful to me.

Lance

Yes, Quicken excludes cash if in an account category called bank accounts. And there is no way I have found to make it include back accounts in a custom report (pretty useless if you cannot have it include bank cash in Portfolio Value or Asset Allocation charts for an overall evaluation).

The good news is that the equity part of my IRA returned
10.64%, thanks to the "coffeehouse" allocation with an
extra helping of international.

The bad news is my 40/60 allocation and a 17% hit on my
GIM drug the overall IRA down to only 4.5% return for the
year. The GIM hit does not worry me as I expect the US
dollar to go south in the future (eventually). Since I am
drawing down the IRA at a 6% rate, the meager 4.5% overall
was disappointing.

Nothing worldbeating here. Somewhere in the 7% return range though I agree with others that it's a difficult number to calculate since we add to the pile on a regular basis and I don't track all the details. We have a hefty portion invested conservatively and some GLW options that were excersized that I didn't include. I know the starting pile and the ending pile and I have no complaints.

In general, a 60/40 (US stocks/bonds) portfolio's return is about 4.56%, while a portfolio with Energy, international stocks, emerging markets, commodity and precious metal would provide double-digit return in 2005.

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May we live in peace and harmony and be free from all human sufferings.

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